OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 17, 2011 3:01 AM ESTFinal Words
I didn't really believe that SandForce could pull it off when I first heard how fast the SF-2000 line would be. Even after CES, I didn't really believe the drives would be this good in real world use cases. Consider me pleasantly surprised.
When connected to a good 6Gbps controller, the Vertex 3 Pro is significantly faster than anything else on the market today. Obviously the V3P itself is an unreleased drive so things could change as its competitors show up as well, but the bar has been set very high. The Vertex 3 Pro is the first SSD to really put 6Gbps SATA to good use. In fact I'd say its the first drive that really needs a 6Gbps interface. Whenever you Sandy Bridge owners get replacement motherboards, this may be the SSD you'll want to pair with them.
Even writing incompressible data the Vertex 3 Pro is faster than current SandForce drives running full tilt. The performance gains we see here are generational, not a simple evolutionary improvement. SandForce has also successfully addressed the limited shortcomings of the original SF-1200 controller with regards to writing incompressible data.
Clearly performance isn't going to be a problem with this generation. The real unknowns are how well will the Vertex 3 (non-Pro) perform and how reliable will these drives be? Intel is still king of the hill when it comes to drive reliability, however OCZ has been investing heavily in improving its manufacturing. I suspect that this next SSD war will be fought both along performance and reliability lines. Unfortunately for us, the latter is very difficult to quantify without a significant sample of drives.
With new controllers from SandForce, Intel and Marvell due out this year we're going to see SSD performance go through the roof and SSD prices to continue to fall. We're still a couple months away from knowing exactly what to buy, but if you've been putting off that move to an SSD - 2011 may be the year to finally pull the trigger.
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FCss - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
"My personal desktop sees about 7GB of writes per day." maybe a stupid question but how do you check the amount of your daily writes?And one more question: if you have a 128Gb SSD and you leave let's say 40Gb unformated so the user can't fill up the disk, will the controller use this space the same way as it would belong to the spare area?
Quindor - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
I use a program called "HDDLED" for this. It shows you some easily accessible leds on your screen and if you hover over it, you can see the current and total disk usage since your PC was booted up.FCss - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
thanks, a great softwareBreit - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
isn't the totally written bytes to the drive since manufacturing be part of the smart data you can read from your drive? all you have to do then is noting down the value when you boot up your pc in the morning and subtract that from the actual value you read there the next day.Chloiber - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Or you can just take the average..marraco - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Vertex 2 takes advantage of unformated space. So OCZ advices to leave 20% of space unformated , (although to improve garbage collection, but it means that unformated space is used)7Enigma - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Comon Anand! In your example you have 185GB free on a 256GB drive. I think that is the least likely scenario that paints an overly optimistic case in terms of write life. Everyone knows not to completely fill up their drive but are you telling me that the vast majority of users are going to have 78% of their drive free at all times? I just don't buy it.The more common scenario is that a consumer purchases a drive slightly larger then needed (due to how expensive these luxuries still are). So that 256GB drive probably will only have 20-40GB free. Do that and that 36 days for a single use of the NAND becomes ~5-8 days (no way to move static data around at this capacity level). Factor in write amplification (0.6X to 10X) and you lower the time to between 4-25 years for hitting that 3000X cap.
Still not a HUGE problem, but much more relevant then saying this drive will last for hundreds of years (not counting NAND lifespan itself).
7Enigma - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Bah I thought the write amplification was 1.6X. That changes the numbers considerably (enough that the point is moot). I still think the example in the article was not a normal circumstance but it seems to still not be an issue.<pie to face>
mark53916 - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Encrypted files are not compressible, so you won't get any advantagefrom the hardware write compression.
7Enigma - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,Looks like one of the numbers is incorrect in this chart. Right now it shows LOWER performance after TRIM then when the drive was completely full. The 230MB/sec value seems to be incorrect.